Wisconsin legislators are voting to prohibit fetal tissue derived from abortions to be used for research.

This bill has been pushed by small-minded, myopic legislators who really fail to understand the bigger picture or the morality and ethics involved. Wisconsin legislators have engaged in scurrilous attacks on Planned Parenthood — based on hidden-camera videos falsely purporting to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells fetal tissue. It is difficult to know which is worse — the manipulative antics of our legislators or their feigned ignorance of the basis for their erroneous contentions.

What happens annually in the case of millions of pregnancy miscarriages with the fetuses, especially when the parents — adults who donate their bodies to science — want these fetuses to be used for scientific research? Should aborted fetuses be treated differently than miscarried fetuses? Neither abortions nor miscarriages are pleasant for any party, but, if some positive results can be generated, they should be availed.

Fetal tissue was used to develop the original polio vaccine and is still used to make vaccines for rubella, shingles, chickenpox and an experimental Ebola vaccine. It also is considered important in “studying conditions that affect the health of fetuses and newborn infants, brain injuries in the womb that lead to cerebral palsy and eye conditions that lead to macular degeneration,” according to The New York Times. The good of society has benefited and hopefully will continue to benefit from this use of fetal tissue.

To watch further, the calls from these uninformed or manipulative legislators to defund Planned Parenthood because of its abortion services, when neither federal nor state funding may be used for abortions, defies logic. Abortions at Planned Parenthood facilities comprise only 2 percent of their provided services. The remaining 98 percent is for general and gynecological health care of economically poor women and girls.

Like much of what we see in both federal and our state legislators, this is a vicious, immoral and class-based attack on both the economically poor and specific races based on specious reasoning.